Dalla penuria al Terrore. Relazioni e pratiche disumane nella Teoria degli Insiemi Pratici

This essay will analyse the variety of the processes of dehumanization that are described by Sartre in the first volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason (Theory of Practical Ensembles). Firstly, Sartre raises the question of which kind of knowledge is truly able to consider human beings in their most human dimension. According to him, this corresponds to an existentialist revisitation of Marxism, which involves both phenomenological and psychoanalytical analyses of the subject. Secondly, he analyzes the places in which dehumanization concretely appears: the contingent but inescapable condition of scarcity; the relationship between the bourgeois owner and his workers in the counter-violence of oppression and exploitation; and finally, the perversion of the group-in-fusion, which, through Fraternity-Terror, results in a new form of seriality. In his last controversial interview, Hope Now, Sartre indicates a possible alternative to these infernal dynamics, which consists in the promotion of a new form of Fraternity finally freed of Terror, which is both an original relationship and a normative task for humanity’s complete fulfilment.